Buzzfeed’s Carolyn Kylstra asked some scientists and medical professionals about juice cleanses and while they are (mostly) harmless, they definitely don’t do any of the magical things you think they do, like flush the toxins out of your body or reset your system.
“I don’t know why someone would do a juice cleanse,” Dr. John Buse, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the division of endocrinology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told BuzzFeed Life. “There’s very little evidence that it does anything good for you.”
And it definitely won’t “rid your body of toxins.” That really is what your liver (and your kidneys and intestines) is for. “I don’t like the marketing around juice cleanses,” Eric Ravussin, Ph.D., associate executive director for clinical science at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, told BuzzFeed Life. “That it’s going to detox and mobilize all these toxins and all that — this is pure marketing.”
Update: From the NY Times in 2009, Flush Those Toxins! Eh, Not So Fast. The last paragraph makes me angry:
Still, many people swear by these programs. Denise Whitney, 37, a registered nurse and mother of three in Traverse City, Mich., did the Master Cleanse over a seven-day period, plus six days of pre and post cleanse, which included consuming copious amounts of organic juice, fruit and vegetables. “With all the fast food, preservatives, chemicals in our food, it seems impossible that our bodies are not loaded with toxins,” Ms. Whitney said, adding that she plans to repeat it in the next few months. “I had more energy during this cleanse than I can ever remember having.”
Can we get this nurse unregistered, please? FFS. But at The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman cautions against over-debunking.
We live in the Age of Debunking: no sooner has somebody made a false or hyperbolic claim online (resulting in clicks) than someone else announces, with an air of triumph, that they’ve debunked it (resulting in clicks). I plead guilty. And often enough, debunking is a noble pursuit: the idea that we only use 10% of our brains, to pick one example, is flat wrong, and people who believe it ought to be corrected. No convincing evidence of a Benghazi conspiracy has ever been unearthed. Marie Antoinette almost certainly didn’t say “let them eat cake”.
But the internet’s enthusiasm for a vigorous debunking now frequently spills over into what you might call the pseudo-debunk. Sometimes, this involves cynically claiming you’re debunking when you’re really just disagreeing — thereby implying that your opinion is more than mere opinion; it’s “the facts”.
Update: Tara Fuller of Greatist writes I’ve Tried Almost Every Cleanse. Here’s Why I’ll Never Do One Again:
2. Eating fruit is much healthier than drinking it.
While juice cleanses may seem like an easy way to load up on vitamins and minerals, they’re often full of added sugars and devoid of the good stuff (like fiber and antioxidants). Juicing fruits does tend to preserve some vitamins, but why guzzle several hundred calories worth of fruit when you can eat one serving and actually feel full? Plus, all that juice can actually lead to type 2 diabetes-whereas eating fruit reduces the risk!
(via @fakejoshstein & @neversent & @alainabrowne)
Update: Once again, Fancy Juice Doesn’t Cleanse the Body of Toxins:
To say that drinking juice detoxifies the body isn’t quite the same as claiming leeches suck out poisons, but it’s fairly close.
The practice of cleansing has become as ubiquitous as the use of hand sanitizer. Celebrities do it. Spas offer it. Fancy food stores sell pricey bottles of juice to accomplish it, and a \$700 juicer will soon facilitate the process for those who are not satisfied with the current D.I.Y. options. But what is it that everybody is trying to remove from their bodies? Is there any science behind it?
“People are interested in this so-called detoxification, but when I ask them what they are trying to get rid of, they aren’t really sure,” said Dr. James H. Grendell, the chief of the division of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y. “I’ve yet to find someone who has specified a toxin they were hoping to be spared.”
Update: This sort of magical health thinking isn’t restricted to juice cleanses. Yvette d’Entremont writes about the sickening business of wellness for The Outline:
Health is all the stuff that you know you should do. Wellness is all the peripheral shit that someone marketed to you because it sounded almost like health. It’s modern-day snake oil, and today it either comes from extremely well-off celebrities who look healthy under 18 layers of makeup, internet charlatans who probably know they’re full of shit, and people who might not know there’s no science to back them up, but they do see your open wallet and know when business is good.
The first part of this video, the bit with the molten sugar and cooling table, is the most interesting, but the whole thing is worth a watch.
Reminds me of the lettered rock made at Teddy Grays.
From artist Mishka Henner, a selection of satellite photos of Texas feedlots, where beef cattle are sent to be “finished”, aka to quickly gain weight for slaughter on a diet of corn. I’m pretty sure the redness of that pit/lake is not blood but algae (or whatever), but it sure creates that impression, doesn’t it?
Gear Patrol visited 12 whiskey distilleries (including Buffalo Trace, Maker’s Mark, and Jim Beam) to find out how bourbon is made.
Cool. Some of that I knew, and some I didn’t. My favorite detail is how the placement of the barrel in the aging room can affect the flavor of the bourbon within. Just like cheese. (via digg)
Photographer Ernie Button photographs the dried remains of single malt scotch whiskies, which end up looking like desolate landscapes on distant worlds.
Curious as to how these patterns were formed by some kinds of whiskey but not others, Button reached out to an engineering professor at Princeton.
Dr. Stone’s group found that the key difference in whisky is that unlike coffee, it consists of two liquids — water and ethyl alcohol. The alcohol evaporates more quickly, and as the fraction of water increases, the surface tension of the droplet changes, an effect first noticed in the 19th century by an Italian scientist, Carlo Marangoni. That, in turn, generates complex flows that contribute to the patterns Mr. Button photographed.
“Here, they actually looked at what happens when you change the fluids that are drying,” said Dr. Yunker, who is soon heading to the Georgia Institute of Technology as a physics professor, “and they found some very neat effects.” (That would be neat in the usual sense of “cool and intriguing” and not as in “I’ll have my whisky neat.”)
(via @pomeranian99)
From the NY Times, an epic listing of recipes for traditional (and not so traditional) Thanksgiving food from each of the 50 US states. Featuring lefse from North Dakota, salty pluff mud pie from South Carolina, turkey tamales from Texas, and cheddar mashed potatoes from Vermont. (via @jimray)
Allen Hemberger cooked his way through one of the most complex cookbooks out there, the Alinea cookbook. Aside from the chefs who work in the kitchen there, Hemberger’s probably the only person to have made every single recipe. These recipes aren’t easy; look at the last one he prepared…he even struggled to find the correct ingredients.
Should I be disturbed or thankful that I’ve never been that passionate about anything ever?
At Serious Eats, Kenji López-Alt sets the record straight about some misconceptions people have about cast iron pans.
The Theory: Seasoning is a thin layer of oil that coats the inside of your skillet. Soap is designed to remove oil, therefore soap will damage your seasoning.
The Reality: Seasoning is actually not a thin layer of oil, it’s a thin layer of polymerized oil, a key distinction. In a properly seasoned cast iron pan, one that has been rubbed with oil and heated repeatedly, the oil has already broken down into a plastic-like substance that has bonded to the surface of the metal. This is what gives well-seasoned cast iron its non-stick properties, and as the material is no longer actually an oil, the surfactants in dish soap should not affect it. Go ahead and soap it up and scrub it out.
I have two cast iron pans, including this skillet I use almost exclusively for making the world’s best pancakes. Although, after hearing from Kenji that vintage cast iron pans can be slight better than modern pans, I might seek a replacement on Etsy. See also how to season a cast iron pan.
In 1985, German director Wim Wenders travelled to Japan and made a film called Tokyo Ga. In this clip of the film, Wenders visits a studio where fake food for display in restaurant windows is made. The clip starts a little slow so give it a bit of time.
What’s surprising is how much the process of making fake food is like the process of making real food. (via open culture)
What is more fun than watching the Danish National Chamber Orchestra play a piece after having eaten some of the world’s hottest chili peppers? Probably a few things, but this is pretty entertaining nonetheless.
Chili consumption happens at 1:36. Classic highbrow + lowbrow stuff here. The brass and woodwind instrument players in particular should get some kind of award…I can’t imagine blowing on a trumpet in that condition. See also Hot Pepper Game Reviews.
John Reed thinks his grandma poisoned a number of her relatives over many years. Maybe.
But here’s the thing: You don’t want to believe your grandmother is poisoning you. You know that she loves you — there’s no doubt of that — and she’s so marvelously grandmotherly and charming. And you know that she would never want to poison you. So despite your better judgment, you eat the food until you’ve passed out so many times that you can’t keep doubting yourself. Eventually, we would arrive for holidays at Grandma’s with groceries and takeout, and she’d seem relieved that we wouldn’t let her touch our plates. By then, her eyesight was starting to go, so she wouldn’t notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.
So the question became: How did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn’t eat grandma’s food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she’d kept her word, so we didn’t mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we’d eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother’s girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.
Christine Muhlke talks to several different chefs and writers about how they approach writing recipes.
The goal should be that the reader can make the recipe his or her own — that the instructions are clear and good enough that after a few tries, he or she can improvise to please themselves. The chef gives ideas so that the cook can profit. It’s not dictation; it’s inspiration.
This is the most delightful restaurant review I’ve read in quite awhile. In it, Jay Rayner disembowels the “hilariously silly” London restaurant Beast and its presumed clientele, “men with teeny-weeny penises”. I have no idea how to pick just one of the great passages from this review so I’ll do two:
“I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve bread.” Eh? What’s all that about? I could see this as some stand for a bang-on-trend, carb-free Palaeolithic diet, were it not for the fact they serve chips. Mind you, they’re crap chips, huge fat things that could exclude drafts. Who actually likes their chips this way? They’re advertised as coming with truffle and foie-gras salt, which is like getting a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted case for your smartphone because you’ve run out of things to spend money on. It’s a spoilt person’s version of luxury; the pillowy “chips” do not taste either of goose liver or truffle.
And:
The corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvellous: rich, deep, earthy, with that dense tang that comes with proper hanging. And at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat.
Reminiscent of Pete Wells’ review of Guy Fieri’s place in Times Square. Some restaurants become immortal and immune to criticism but I don’t think Beast and Guy Fieri’s are quite there yet.
Do you want to make a lot of espresso really fast? Enter the The Gatlino®, a machine gun that uses Nespresso capsules in place of bullets.
It was during one bleary break-of-dawn that I found myself slouched over the machine making coffee and drifting into visions of the Nespresso hooked up to a belt of ammunition, or a machine gun being fed by a chain of Nespresso capsules. I’m not sure which. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it led me to wonder how long it would take to fire all the Nespresso cartridges ever made. The environmentally-conscious will be appalled.
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